Google To Hand Over Private Wifi Data To European Governments

Google has agreed to hand over the data it accidentally recorded from private wifi networks to four European governments, the Financial Times reports.

Since admitting that its Street View cars, which were tasked with recording impersonal network ID information from networks to help boost its location data, had been recording snippets of "payload data" as well, Google has been under fire from watchdog groups and governments in both the United States and Europe.

Google initially announced its plans to dispose of the data; governments and litigants cried foul, arguing that the data could be used as evidence in lawsuits over the matter. A court order in the U.S. last week forbade Google from destroying any of the data, and ordered that all of it be turned over to the court.

The data recorded in Europe will presumably show exactly the same things about what Google was up to as the data already handed over in the U.S., so this is unlikely to have much substantive impact on the scandal.

Google has somehow managed to keep this story out of the spotlight so far. That's as it should be -- there is as of yet no publicly available evidence to suggest that Google did anything wrong, or that anyone's privacy was actually violated.

Still, the story sounds very bad on the surface, which is more than enough for this to turn into a major headache for Google if it doesn't go away soon.